March 3, 2025
Planners excel at engaging with people in the communities they serve, but what about connecting with one another? Whether you gather to swap war stories, share ideas, or just have some fun, spending time with fellow planning colleagues is important for many reasons, not the least of which is staying mentally healthy in an increasingly chaotic world.
Jeffrey Goodman, AICP, knows this — and he certainly knows how to let the good times roll. For nearly a decade, the New Orleans–based planner has been the captain of Krewe D'Ensité, a group of planners who gather in French garb to march during the Mardi Gras parade season. Their tagline: affordabilité, walkabilité, vibrancé. (None of those, by the way, are real French words.)
In an episode of the APA podcast series Short Takes, Goodman shared how he builds community through humor, zany French puns, and taking planning to the streets — quite literally.
Krewe D'Ensité founder Jeffrey Goodman. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Goodman.
GOODMAN: Krewe D'Ensité — pronounced "density" with a French accent — is an urban planning–themed walking krewe of about 150 people. While other Carnival krewes march in elaborately decorated costumes or with complicated dance moves, we parade through the streets of New Orleans dressed as French protestors — think berets, Breton-striped shirts, and printed signs — with puns about zoning.
With Carnival and all the parades, New Orleans is a place where everyone participates, where everyone is gathered in Mardi Gras, and if this isn't the place and time to put planners and planning topics in front of thousands of people at once, I don't know what is.
So, in Carnival, every krewe has a signature throw, a unique trinket we give out as we march. The Krewe of Muses has hand-glittered shoes, Zulu has coconuts, and we give out miniature protest signs made with popsicle sticks. All the signs are jokes about urban planning, local real estate issues, resiliency, local government — usually with some sort of French twist.
People really love puns. I love puns. I'm glad I'm a father so I can make them with free abandon.
'Gentrifiers against gentrification'
Some of my favorites? Well, there's Master of my eminent domain. Or, The more things climate change, the more they stay the same. How about What I love about tourism jobs is that I get older, and they stay the same wage? We had a René Magritte–themed float telling everyone to Invest in surreal estate. There are a lot of good ones: The suburbs: pedestrian but not walkable. Asking, Public comment allez-vous?
This year, our parade fell on Valentine's Day so we tried to make planning a little sexier. Our signature throw was a folded paper fortune teller for the Erogenous Zoning Review Board.
One year our theme was Gentrifiers against gentrification, poking fun at a certain attitude we hear at public meetings. It was fascinating to see the theme play out as the parade was going past. On one side of the street is an area that really hasn't gentrified very much, and those parade-goers recognized it as a joke, as a type of person they know. The other side was from an area that had gentrified, and I don't think some of them knew it was a joke. Some of them were just like, "Yes, so true. Like, we've got to do better."
It's fun, but if it can also get some wheels turning, I'm OK with that. You look at parts of New Orleans and a lot of other major cities, and they are gentrifying. But if you ask individual people, "Are you a gentrifier?" no one would say they are. But someone is! We often talk about planning processes as if they are happening on their own without people making choices. So, we're making fun of ourselves as planners, too.
For our krewe members, the parade is about being able to blow off some steam in a safe place. As planners, we often are in positions where we have to be pretty even-handed in how we communicate. I think it's important as a discipline to have a space where you can have fun, where you can joke about these topics — even where you can point out where the profession isn't doing a great job.
The planning is the best part
It's not just the parade, which is wonderful. It's also about sitting around the table making the throws, gluing popsicle sticks together. We've got people who are 22 years old and straight out of college, and we've got people who are retired. There are planners in the housing space and others in resilience. We have all sorts of different people, and it's just great to have conversations and be able to talk about what we do, our interests, and our lives outside of work, all while sitting around making a funny, punny button.
Planning topics can be heavy sometimes and a lot of the regular ways planners come together is so business or career focused. I'm very proud to have done this for many years, and we're going to keep doing it until they tell us to stop. Or until I run out of puns, which will never happen.
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